Troy’s Public Library Board has voted to voluntarily recognize a staff union.
In a December vote, the library’s Board of Trustees voluntarily recognized the union of staff at both its main location in downtown Troy and the Lansingburgh branch.
The nearly 200-year-old library system serves the greater city of Troy and neighboring municipalities. The main location is undergoing a roof renovation and its Lansingburgh location is being renovated following severe water damage in 2023.
In 2024, a new Executive Director, Tim Furgal, was hired. The position was previously vacated by Paul Hicok, who led the library for nearly 40-years. In a statement, Furgal said, “We have to do better as an organization. We owe it to our staff.”
Board President Alexander Hanse says unionizing will support employees and allow them to better serve the public. Hanse says with a new executive, change was bound to happen.
“I think myself, along with the rest of the board, recognized that their intent was good, they said as much in the letter that they delivered to us,” Hanse said. “They, along with everyone else, was cognizant of the tremendous amount of change we were going and wanted to work together collectively to make the library a better place and to that end, bargain in good faith, in cooperation with the board to get them a contract that allows them to serve the public library, better serve, to better serve the public, while not having to have sometimes two jobs.”
Last year, city voters approved a 15 percent increase in the library’s budget.
With roughly three-dozen employees, Hanse says the unionization will directly benefits employees, personally and professionally.
“Increasing the safety of our staff involves, probably essentially redesigning how the staff are trained, enhancements to our physical security, our monitoring security we're in we're. We have several old buildings in Troy. Sight lines aren't great. Spaces aren't designed for the use of a 21st century modern library. These are antique buildings. Retrofitting them is complex, but I know we are up to the task, changing the physical infrastructure, enhancing it, technologically, where we can. These are all important things that have been at the front of the mind from the board perspective, and now it'll be, it'll be welcome to actually work with the staff to see where the gaps in our understanding is, since we're not the ones on the front lines working at the library every day to develop a more comprehensive safety plan for the entire institution and everybody who works there and visits there.”
Henry Cooley, an employee of just over two-years, is on the union bargaining committee. A circulation desk staffer, Cooley says efforts to form a union at the library have been ongoing for more than a decade.
“There have been many attempts at this. The earliest I know of was shortly after the ’08 crash. And then this is the, you know, obviously, the first successful one. And a coworker and I started batting this idea around, I think, in the summer of 2023 and it was very slow, and it didn't really happen until we got some more energetic people on board. But it really started to ramp up, I would say, this past summer, as we started to gain momentum, it was a moment of pretty extreme change at the library, and that allowed us to make a case to the staff that this would offer us an opportunity to help shape that change and guide the library's future towards a better place for the staff.”
Cooley says in his time, there has been a significant amount of turnover, saying that the library is unable to offer competitive wages, which the board acknowledges.
Bargaining began this week. Cooley says he hopes it is quick and benefits employees and the community. Cooley says the better taken care of the employees are, the better they’re able to serve the public.
“We have a list of bullet points on this proposal, and we're just going to go one by one, start talking about it, come to agreements. And you know, over the course of several sessions, we're hoping this doesn't take longer than a few months, we will come up with a tentative agreement, which the board will vote to recognize, and the staff will also vote to recognize, and then we'll start working under contract.”
